As the Yiddish saying almost goes, if you want to make Oscar voters laugh show them your plans. Certainly the Oscar plans for this barnstorming Jennifer Lopez musical were watertight when the film was conceived in December 2023. Back then Lopez’s new hubby, Ben Affleck, was on board as a producer, while the Oscar-winning film-maker Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) had been hired to adapt the Kander and Ebb stage musical about two mismatched prisoners sharing a cell during Argentina’s Dirty War, based on the 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. 

The previous nonmusical adaptation, from 1985, had been a trophy magnet, nabbing four Oscar nominations, including a win for William Hurt for playing the irrepressible gay protagonist Luis Molina. And so this version, boasting a hugely committed performer in Lopez (in multiple roles), a provocative screenplay from Condon and tunes from the legends behind Chicago and Cabaret, was declaring itself an Oscar frontrunner before a single frame was shot. What could go wrong? 

Where to start? Lopez and Affleck’s marriage collapsed. Lopez was vilified online for being a “narcissist” in her vanity documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told and subsequently cancelled her 2024 This Is Me… Live tour. Meanwhile, the gender-busting musical Emilia Pérez cornered the market on Latin-themed musicals about politics and sexuality. And when, in early 2025, Kiss of the Spider Woman was launched it was instantly knocked out of Oscar contention by The Secret Agent, a similarly inventive parable about fantasy and South American politics that would ultimately garner four Academy Award nominations. The Lopez film was ignored, then flopped, with $1.7 million returns worldwide (so far), leaving Lopez “deeply depressed”. 

But the film is great, bristling with ideas and hard-won epiphanies. It opens in Argentina in 1983, with Lopez as the eponymous Spider Woman purring through a haunting melody that invites us to “come and find me, hear my song, let me hold you here, where you belong!” She is, we soon discover, the sultry screen idol of the movie obsessive and Dirty War prisoner Molina (an astounding Tonatiuh Elizarraraz, aka Tonatiuh). 

The Spider Woman is a femme fatale with a choppy bob from Molina’s favourite movie, a classic musical called, yup, Kiss of the Spider Woman. She is played by the (fictional) actress and icon Ingrid Luna, who Lopez here imagines as a furious mix of Marilyn Monroe and Dolores del Río. Molina describes the film in loving detail to his irascible cellmate, the political activist Valentin (Diego Luna). It then erupts repeatedly into their dank prison lives like gorgeous Technicolor blasts of How to Marry a Millionaire or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Condon’s attention to MGM-era period detail is exquisite.

The film-within-the-film is where most of the Kander and Ebb tunes are delivered (there’s one crossover track, called Where You Are), but it also fuels a continuous argument between Molina and Valentin about the point, if any, of glossy escapist cinema during politically turbulent times. Topical? Just a bit.

The pair argue about sexuality and gender too, but nearly always with an undertow of wit and compassion. “If a man called me a woman I would kill him,” Valentin hisses. Molina’s reply? “If a man called me a man I would faint!” And all the while Condon is slowly revealing a tense subplot about a subterfuge in the cell that threatens the growing bond, platonic then romantic, between Molina and Valentin.

The finale remains appropriately uncompromising while the unfettered performance of Lopez is definitely applause if not awards-worthy. Her best song, the knockout title track, arrives very late, perhaps too late, into the action. And, alas, some of the other tunes are so perfectly vintage, and deliberately dated, that they can occasionally lack personality. But this, in the end, hardly justifies flop status for an otherwise superlative film. 
★★★★☆
15, 128min
In cinemas from Apr 17

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